The Retirement Wealth Inequality Machine

One of the big activity and I hate to use the word, talent drains is the amount of time and energy devoted to the secondary trading of securities, which does absolutely nothing to support growth.

It’s asset-shuffling which does not send terribly good signals as to the pricing of capital assets (and in any event, research has repeatedly found that business managers generally assign overly high return targets for projects, leading to chronic underinvestment, particularly in projects with back-ended payoffs).

Use psychological pricing methods.

To put this another way, one person’s financial asset is another person’s financial liability. And as Micheal Hudson has repeatedly pointed out, expecting debt, and by extension, other financial assets to earn above inflation returns simply leads to period busts.

The best way to provide for retirement is to look to MMT-based solutions. The currency issuer can create new spending with the constraint being generating too much inflation. Having the national government play a bigger role in retirement funding also aligns incentives better, since the powers that be would have incentives to find ways to make sure that employers didn’t discriminate against older workers

Most older workers have increasingly fewer retirement options, forcing the elderly to continue to work under arduous conditions to earn income. At the same time, employers are less likely to hire elderly workers. The retirement wealth inequality machine has churned out the specter of isolation, malnutrition, and poverty for retirement age workers.

Demonstrate the differences

More asset-shuffling through public-private partnerships will not solve the moral catastrophe of short-termerism and greed that prevents enterprises from investing in the human timeframe of a lifespan, that might support a proper social safety net.

Offer a money-back guarantee

A sane government which had the interests of all citizens at heart would impose a confiscatory tax system on asset shufflers and short term greed. This is the opposite of the policies of our political class, who prefer voter suppression to the sort of democracy that would find the impoverishment of our elders intolerable.

Test your offer and price, and be creative.

Thus, how such programs are set up and administered is likely to merely expand financial asset management fees while collecting taxes and penalties to boost the treasury – with little improvement in retirement outcomes.